Audie Murphy Centennial

June 20, 2024 marks the centennial of Audie Murphy, a young man from Texas who joined the army in 1942 and fought Nazis in World War II. He became the most decorated soldier in U.S. military history. After the war, he was recruited by Hollywood where he starred in films from 1949 to 1967. He died in a plane crash in 1971.

Most of his films were westerns made under contract to Universal Pictures, starting in 1950 with THE KID FROM TEXAS, in which he played Billy the Kid, and continuing with KANSAS RAIDERS, also 1950, in which he played Jesse James, and Budd Boetticher’s THE CIMARRON KID (1952), in which he played Bill Doolin. He continued to star in westerns until 40 GUNS TO APACHE PASS (1967), before his final film appearance in a cameo as an aging Jesse James in Boetticher’s A TIME FOR DYING (1969).

Audie Murphy as Jesse James in KANSAS RAIDERS

MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO Comes to America, 1993

In 1992 I acquired a VHS tape of Hayao Miyazaki’s MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988), copied from an unsubtitled Japanese laserdisc. It was only the second example of Japanese animation I’d managed to find on tape. Watching it in untranslated Japanese was the first encounter with the film for both my daughter and me. It began a love affair, which continues unabated to this day, with a film I would describe in print 15 years later as “the gold standard for Japanese animated children’s films, on a par with the greatest Disney classics and arguably the best loved anime film of all time.” Needless to say, the lack of subtitles at the time didn’t diminish the film’s appeal for either of us or any of the nieces and nephews to whom I soon showed it. Miyazaki was, at this point, still the little secret of a small coterie of American anime fans, whom I had only recently joined. That would soon change.

The following year, 1993, TOTORO was released in a limited theatrical release in the U.S. in an English-dubbed version. It was distributed by Troma Films, under its label 50th St. Films, a release supervised by Carl Morano. Troma Films was normally associated with low-budget exploitation parodies for the midnight show circuit with titles like THE TOXIC AVENGER, THE CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH and SURF NAZIS MUST DIE. Here’s a two-sided flyer for the TOTORO release, picked up somewhere in 1993, probably at the theater where I saw it:

Notice the ads for three books based on Miyazaki’s films, TOTORO, KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE and LAPUTA: CASTLE IN THE SKY. The latter two films had not yet been released in the U.S. other than a few repertory showings of LAPUTA.